/ / News, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Update: I’ve just been notified that this is the Schuler’s Books in Eastwood — not the one in Meridian Mall!

Tomorrow night, I’m doing my last Michigan appearance for the foreseeable future — a signing and reading at Lansing’s Schuler Books and Music (Meridian Mall) at 7:30PM. Last night’s event at Archive Bookshop went swimmingly, despite the torrential rains, and attendees got to hear a little of “Themepunks,” the novel I’m working on for next year. Tomorrow I’ll read from “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” a novella I’ve been working on here at Clarion. Hope to see you there!

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptable power-supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong — he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too — he had logs that showed that after 1AM, nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity — AKA Felix’s Law.

Five minutes later he was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix it from home. The independent router’s netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.

Where: Schuler Books and Music, Meridian Mall, 2820 Towne Center Blvd., Lansing, MI 48912, (517) 316-7495

When: Thursday, July 7, 7:30PM